War income

[amalan11]

I was wondering if any older posters know this ?? listining to news today the Military people are upset that their pay is being cut.It got me thinking did we pay our men to go and fight in WW1 or WW2   or Vietnam?

I had never really thought about it before ,I guess I just assumed they went for the love of Australia .I guess the families must have had some help as it would be impossible for a wife and children to survive in the absence of the man when women didn't work

can anyone enlighten me

[amalan11]

I got the 1 5 cents of some google site, must be inacurate.thought it was odd it was already in cents but asumed they had done conversion already. thats quite funny you still remembering after all these years ..

I remember my mum complaining at the prices for vegies especialy tomatos,now im an adult I have turned into her lol

[lyndal1838]

What is funny about remembering something that happened when I was 9 or 10?  Believe me, seeing my mother angry about something was not easily forgotten, even if it was nearly 60 years ago.

It was not that long before that particular price rise that bread had been 10d (10 pence) or 10 cents so it was a pretty hefty rise in a short period of time....about a 30% rise.   It got the same sort of reaction that a price rise would get today if bread went from $3 to $4 in one jump.

And bread was not sliced and wrapped individually in plastic....you could buy a whole loaf or a half loaf and the shopkeeper took it out of the cupboard and wrapped it in tissue paper.  I used to pick up a whole loaf for Mum and a half loaf for my Nana twice a week.

[iapetus_rocks]

When people talk about prices today and how they were much lower in the past, I wonder if they consider the price of say, a loaf of bread as a percentage; that is, one loaf of bread cost me X% of my weekly wage in the year 1890 or so, and today, it cost me X + or X -  something percent of my weekly wage?

When I was young, a gallon of petrol cost about 44 cents but the income of a lab technician at the uni my dad worked at was about $3,500 per annum. A brand new Datsun 1200 cost about $3,000 if I remember rightly (but I might not, because that's a long time ago) 😉

[lyndal1838]

It is a bit late for my brain to work properly but I do remember that a loaf of bread at 1/- was not all that cheap as a percentage of income, which is why my mum was so annoyed at the fairly substantial jump.

Dad was a designing electrical engineer who was working on the Snowy Mountains Scheme so we were not exactly poor but like many families who had gone through the Depression and the War it was a case of look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves.

I am more familiar with the prices in the mid 1960s.

My OH was in the Navy and in 1967 we were living in Canberra at HMAS Harman.  He was earning about $55 a week (paid fortnightly) and we rented a fully furnished house on the base for $6 so quite heavily subsidised.  We had acess to pertol on the base and again it was substantially cheaper than most people paid.  It was supposed to only be available to families living on the base but when my parents visited from Sydney my OH suddenly "aquired" a new car....he filled dad's car up just before they left for home and Dad always commented how cheap it was.

Although the Defence services were not all that well paid, there were some perks that helped make up for that.  As an example, the sailors could buy top quality Dri Glow bath towels for a few shillings...roughly half the price in the shops at the time.  They were only available in blue but they were such great quality that I was still using them 30 years later.  The officers could buy white bath sheets at dirt cheap prices...I had a couple when my children were young and ended up passing them on to my daughter for her children...I think she has finally worn them out, 44 years after they were first bought.